David Morrell - NightScape

JAMIE

Deep-space…

Jamie hesitates again, shakes her head in confusion.

JAMIE

Psychology? I think. My specialty is…

She reaches the crest and slumps across it, head on one side, legs on the other.

JAMIE

Adaptation to confinement? How long, dear God? How long?

THE SIREN BLARES.

Jamie raises her weary head. Her determined eyes glare toward the ceiling.

JAMIE

I need to rest!

Again we hear the SIZZLE AND CRACKLE of electrical current.

Jamie screams. THE BEEP INCREASES. She strains to raise her body off the painful torturing peak of the slope. In a frenzy, she topples over the rim.

On the opposite side, she tumbles, groaning, down a slope. She lands hard on a level surface.

She struggles for breath, kneels, and manages to stand.

JAMIE

My name is Jamie Neal. I'm twenty-eight. I'm an assistant professor of…I'm a human being. And no matter how much you break your word, no matter how much you torture me…! I'll fight back! I swear it! I'll fight back!

THE SIREN WAILS.

JAMIE

flinches. THE BEEP INCREASES. But she stays in place.

Abruptly the current CRACKLES AND SIZZLES, and as if thrust by a cattle prod, she lurches forward. THE BEEP becomes EVEN MORE RAPID.

JAMIE

You broke your word! I'll break mine!

MORE CRACKLING AND SIZZLING.

Her face contorted with agony, Jamie stumbles across an open space and reaches a metal ladder. Prodded by the SIZZLING electrical current, she scurries upward.

JAMIE

Jamie Neal. Jamie Neal. Jamie Neal.

She disappears through a circle in the ceiling above the ladder.

The SIZZLING stops as Jamie topples from the ladder and lands hard in another area. Groaning, she slowly raises her head.

Squints.

Shakes her head to clear her vision.

JAMIE

(seeking refuge in her song)

"The oceans and the forests, the earth and the sky belong to you and me."

The room is filled with mirrors, like a "fun house" in an amusement park.

JAMIE

You changed it again!

With enormous effort, she stands. THE BEEP INCREASES.

JAMIE

It's all a lie! You never meant to…!

She struggles forward, glaring toward the mirrors.

Each reveals a different image. She's fat. She's thin. She's tall. She's short. She's twisted. Concave. Convex.

JAMIE

Now I'm the one who's a monster! You've turned me into…!

(recoils from the mirrors)

You! I'll get even! I swear I'll get even!

OFF STAGE, WE HEAR A HISS. Jamie spins in terror, THE BEEP EVEN FASTER. A door slides open. A shadow fills the entrance. Jamie cringes.

The shadow becomes a…what to call it?…not human…misshapen, with ganglia, and boils, and several eyes.

MONSTER

(voice distorted, an electronic simulation)

You've done very well. Today you've been especially adaptive…and especially amusing. You've earned your reward.

The monster raises a flat box.

MONSTER

Your nourishment. Just the way you prefer it. With double cheese and black olives.

JAMIE

I'm allergic to black olives.

The monster's grotesque arm sags.

MONSTER

I'm sorry. I'm new at this facility. I was told that your species craves those foods.

JAMIE

straightens, braces her shoulders, inhales, and glowers. THE BEEP BECOMES VERY RAPID.

JAMIE

And I told you I'd fight back. You broke your bargain. Now I'll break mine.

MONSTER

There's nothing you can do. This is the way things are. You have one more task to perform before you can eat.

Suddenly horizontal RAYS OF LIGHT fill the space between them. The rays are like transparent, multicolored poles in a grotesque climbing gym. They CRACKLE AND HISS with electrical current.

JAMIE

looks more angry.

JAMIE

I'm Jamie Neal!

MONSTER

We know.

Jamie crawls under one of the rays. A portion of it touches her back and shocks her.

Groaning, she stands. She squeezes between two other rays but comes too close and again gets shocked.

JAMIE

I'm a human being!

MONSTER

We know that, also.

JAMIE

Wrong! You don't have the faintest idea! Watch me prove it!

She braces herself and walks straight into the remaining rays, electricity jolting her. As the CRACKLE becomes unbearable, she takes slow, agonized, determined steps, plodding toward her captor. Blisters appear on her face. Emerging from the rays, she staggers toward the monster, grabs the box, hurls it angrily away, wavers, then falls to the floor.

CLOSE UP on her burned, bleeding hand as it twitches, then becomes motionless.

THE FRANTIC BEEP STOPS.

The monster stares down in bewilderment.

A section of the ceiling slides away, revealing another monster.

MONSTER 2

(distorted voice)

How unfortunate. She was particularly entertaining.

MONSTER 1

After all this time…I still don't understand their emotions… but…

(lowers his head)

I suspect that I'm feeling…what do they call it?

MONSTER 2

Grief.

MONSTER 1

Yes. An unusual emotion. The experiment failed.

MONSTER 2

Not totally. We learned something.

MONSTER 1

What?

MONSTER 2

When we scanned her mind, we learned that her species kept rodent-like creatures…hamsters?…in similar cages. What they called "habitats." Apparently her kind were hypocrites. They enjoyed having…but didn't like…in fact, they loathed… being pets.

FADE OUT.

Few writers have been as prolific as Stirling Silliphant, whose literate yet action-filled scripts for the classic TV series Route 66 (1960-64) made me want to be a writer. Over the decades, we became friends. Indeed, thanks to his urging, NBC produced a miniseries of my novel, The Brotherhood of the Rose, A pleasant, stocky man with sandy hair, a boyish smile, and a wonderful tenor voice, he was 70 when I last saw him. During our final dinner together, he confided in me that he was being offered fewer and fewer writing assignments. "In a youth-oriented industry, I'm perceived as too old," he told me. It didn't matter that he had received an Academy Award for 1967's In the Heat of the Night, or that his script for 1968's Charly had given Cliff Robertson the opportunity to deliver an Oscar-winning performance, or that Stirling had written some of the most financially successful movies of the 1970s (The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno), fill the industry cared about was the young, new flavor of the month. In fact, most of the executives with whom Stirling had meetings were so young (in their mid-twenties) that they had never seen In the Heat of the Night, Charly, or The Towering Inferno, A s for Route 66, the series had been on TV so long ago that it was re-run as a nostalgia series on Nick at Nite. Hardly the "with it" factor that executives worship. The intelligence of the industry had so declined that Stirling's agent advised him not to take a complete list of his credits to a studio interview because a: the executive wouldn't believe that anyone could write that much and b: the executive would feel intimidated.

Stirling eventually decided to chuck it all and move to Thailand, where he believed that in a past incarnation he had been an Oriental. He had what he called "a Beverly Hills garage sale," relocated to Bangkok, and became a Buddhist. We exchanged letters and tried to make plans for me to visit him, but something always interfered. In 1996, at the age of 78, he died from prostate cancer.

Tell me that again," I said. "He must have been joking."